No Amount Of Social Engineering Will Make A Stupid Man Smart

December 22, 1996|By Charley Reese of The Sentinel Staff

Equal in the eyes of God and equal in the eyes of the law, but unequal in all other respects. That, I believe, is a basic truth. I think that social determinism is folly, and $5 trillion worth of social engineering won't make a lazy man industrious, a stupid man smart or turn a killer into a priest.

What throws me further out of style, as far as liberal elitists are concerned, is that I have begun to suspect that we are more genetically determined than has been fashionable to believe in recent decades.

A friend of mine once said, ''Reese, if they announced the Russians were going to drop an H-bomb on us at noon, you'd look at your watch and say, 'Well, we still have 15 minutes. Let's go get a cup of coffee.' ''

Because I was only 18 at the time, I cannot attribute my stoicism to philosophy and meditation. As far as I can remember, I always have been somewhat hot-tempered but not otherwise excitable.

When I was much younger and fishing on the banks of Pine Island Bayou in East Texas with my next-door neighbors, some fool in the woods on the far bank fired several shots from a rifle, and one of the bullets whizzed about a quarter-inch past my ear.

I continued to fish but remarked that someone was shooting in our general direction. My neighbor retrieved his own rifle, shouted a few choice words and, to punctuate them, fired several rounds into the trees on the far bank. We heard nothing else and the shooting stopped. We spent the rest of the afternoon catching perch. That was back in the self-reliant days when people never gave a thought to government except in time of war.

One reason I prefer to watch sports events on television rather than in person is because I feel somewhat awkward sitting quietly in the midst of madly cheering people. It's not that I don't enjoy the game, but it is, after all, only a game and no reason that I can see to get excited.

Well, is this trait genetic or did I absorb too well the admonitions of my father that you should never tip your hand, when playing poker, with facial expressions? I have no scientific evidence either way but there is a family story about a son who left, presumably on an errand, and disappeared for 10 years. When he returned, his mother was in the yard. He said, ''Hello.'' She looked up and replied, ''Go on in and wash up. I'm fixin' to put supper on.''

So, to sum up, I have observed in my own life that I have pretty much always been the same person, despite changes in knowledge and experience. I have observed that few, if any, people ever make basic changes in their character and disposition (fanatic sinners who are saved generally become fanatic do-gooders). I have observed that, despite trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of bureaucrats the social engineering schemes have, by any reasonable measure, been a failure in effecting real changes in human behavior.

The old-time religion appears to be right. Call it original sin or human nature, but humans appear to be incapable of perfection. At the time of the American Revolution, no one had the least doubt about that. What we have to do is get rid of the social-engineering mind-set and do as our forefathers did - make the best society we can based on people as they are, not based on people as some egghead imagines they can be forced or manipulated to become.

A happy society, like a good marriage, will accommodate people as they are, warts and all. The modern liberal society is in a state of constant agitation because the social engineers insist on constantly trying to change people and to tinker with their lives to achieve an egalitarian goal. The liberal says to a ''D'' student, ''I'm going to find some way to make you an 'A' student.'' The conservative says, ''OK, you're a 'D' student. So what. Let's find a place for you in this economy.'' That is a huge difference. Marxist and Nazi social engineers in this century have been mass murderers on a scale unprecedented in history.